


Hosanna

by beanarie



Category: Firefly, Serenity (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Implied Future Character Death, Kid Fic, Post Serenity, canon follow-up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-20
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 09:09:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/809843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/pseuds/beanarie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>I ain't so afraid of losing something that I ain't gonna try and have it.</i>
</p>
<p>About making the best of things, after all the losses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hosanna

**Author's Note:**

> This is me playing with the creators' reports that had Firefly not been cancelled, Zoe would have had a baby and Inara would have had a terminal disease.

Three weeks after they bury their own, Zoe sits down on Simon's exam table.

"Been feelin' funny, Doc." She describes an achiness kind of like a stomach bug but not, since she hasn't thrown up at all. She's just taken a few steps in that direction, several times.

"Are you certain you aren't..." Simon furrows his brow, a sad combination of thoughtfulness and remembered pain, and she holds her breath for a bare second.

"Huh," she says. "Well, all right then."

*

That night she takes out the Hawaiian shirt she'd shoved in the furthest corner of her quarters when everything else had been dumped at whatever rock they'd touched down after the memorial. It's flowery and ridiculous. Green and orange and blue shouldn't fit together. Almost every other time but this, they don't. 

She wraps herself up and curls up tight, taking up only half the bed. She thinks on the amazing father he would have been.

It isn't the first time she's cried for him. Lord knows it won't be the last. But in the morning her eyes are clear, and she's planned what she's going to do for the next few months.

*

"We should maybe start taking jobs where you can get by with just Jayne as backup," she says. 

A smart woman would take this opportunity to settle down, to find a planet, buy a patch of land with her ill-gotten gains and be respectable.

Mal covers her hand with his, squeezing gently.

"Just for a ways," she continues. "I ain't forfeiting my commission." 

Zoe has never had much in the way of brains.

*

One of the toughest things to get used to is going back for seconds at meal-times. Thirty plus years of hard-living tells her this is wasteful, selfish. But then she looks down at her growing belly and thinks, _Not like our kid doesn't deserve this and more_. 

Kaylee finds her in the kitchen finishing up her second bowl of noodles. She pours Zoe a cup of tea.

"It's mighty convenient, you being knocked up already." Kaylee smiles in a way Zoe hasn't seen before. "Makes everybody less like to lose their minds when I tell 'em about me."

*

Kaylee and Simon are married in a field of blue flowers colored by an orange sunset. Kaylee's dress fits only a little tighter than it should. Her smile would light up a city. In her mind, Zoe lights a candle for the shepherd who should have presided.

Inara keeps a dainty scrap of cloth clutched in her hand the whole time. "I'm so glad I was around for this," she says, as she dabs at her eyes.

* 

Hosanna Washburne comes into the verse, eight pounds and three ounces of curly reddish hair and tan skin. She has a hawk nose and rounded green eyes always looking, looking. 

Girl's nosey as all get-out.

Kaylee cries, even as she jokes that Simon better do just as good a job delivering his own bundle of joy. "If you can come up with a way for me to sleep through it, I'd be right fine with that." she says.

Inara cries, too. Again she looks strangely... grateful.

Jayne stays far away for the days surrounding the birth. But Zoe finds a plastic dinosaur outside her quarters, and River tips her head in his direction.

He grunts dismissively. "Just found it on the lower deck. No parts she could swaller, and that's why babies can't have most toys, so I figured might as well. Hers anyway, really." He turns, beginning the motions to shuffle away, then he faces her again. "Wash. He was always decent to folks."

She keeps her chin high. "Hell yeah he was."

*

Josie has just learned to sit up. Zoe buries her face in the baby's soft belly, murmuring what a smart girl she is. 

Kaylee knocks on the door. She's the size of a house, paler than usual, and her eyes are wet. It takes three tries for her to get the words out.

"Inara. Mal just found her in her quarters 'cause nobody's heard from her in a whole half a day and he couldn't wake her up. Simon's making that face he makes when he doesn't want to tell what he's thinkin'." She wipes her nose on the back of her hand and sobs. "It's bad, Zoe. I can tell it's powerful bad."

*

As soon as he trusts he can step away from her for a spell, Simon tells them the story.

Mal looks a lot like he does when somebody shoots him, like he's heard the noise and he's just waiting for the pain. "All this time?" he asks.

"She never told me when it all started, but I know it's been years. She's in the advanced stages. The retrovirals no longer work. There are treatments that would buy her more time, but we've discussed her options, at length." He looks straight at Mal, and Mal goes white. 

"She wants to die at home," Zoe says.

*

Kaylee's water breaks the next day. It's almost four weeks early, but he's fine. The kid's got a mighty set of lungs and a clear desire to use them.

His official name is Julian Tam. Nice enough, heaps respectable. But Kaylee starts referring to him as "my li'l doohickey" and within a few days, Dude is all anyone will call him.

*

A week passes, and Inara opens her eyes. Mal spends the day in the clinic. Zoe guards the door, more to keep him from running off than to prevent anyone coming in. A day after that, there's color in her cheeks and she wants to go back to her place. 

Mal lifts her up and carries her himself. 

Poor sleep-deprived Simon pert near has a heart attack when he gets back to his clinic and finds it empty.


End file.
